Calculating the cost of rebuilding those walls

Bobby's wife, Mabel, looks after him well – the elastic band attempting to secure the lid of his plastic box is at full stretch under the pressure of meat pies, sandwiches, chocolate biscuits, an apple pie, a yogurt and a peeled orange.

"How do you manage to bend down for the lower courses with all that jock in your belly, Bobby?" I ask.

"Well, it's a struggle sometimes Billy," he grins, "but a gut like this can be handy for pushing the through stones into place."

Bobby was a two-times British dry stone walling champion two decades ago, a fact which generally arises several times in the course of a 30-minute conversation. This is one of the reasons why we tend to work alone. Half an hour is entertaining. An eight-hour shift with Bobby is just too much for any man.

From our vantage point we can look over the Pennine valley where we both live and work. Bobby swallows one of his sandwiches whole, ponders for a minute, and speaks.

"How much would it cost to build all them walls today,?"

This is a question which I have also asked myself on several occasions. Through the raindrops and mud on the windscreen of our private restaurant we can see several miles of walls enclosing the small fields which are a major feature of England's backbone.

Depending on the stone, lie of the land and accessibility a square metre of rebuilt agricultural wall can vary from 18-40.

The wall surrounding a five-acre square field (about two good football pitches) would be 550m in length and allowing for a height of 1.4 metres, would contain 770 square metres of new wall. Taking a mid-range figure of 25/m2, the cost of rebuilding such a wall is just short of 20,000 and, at that price, the cost of the new

wall is more than the value of the land.

Thinking a bit deeper about Bobby's simple question, it seems this calculation has only just scratched the surface. Our sums assume that the required stone is already available and piled close to the wall footings.

Two or three hundred years ago, when a lot of these walls were first built, there may have been some rough undressed blocks of stone lying in the five-acre plot.

The men who created the landscape we view today would have loaded these onto horse-drawn carts or sledges and dragged them to the edge.

The blocks would then be roughly dressed with a hammer and heaped up ready for use.

The rest of the stone came from the numerous delph holes (small quarries) which abound in the upland areas of Yorkshire. If in luck, our field creator may have a good supply of sound flat-bedded millstone grit close to the surface. Newly quarried material like this is soft and easily worked and its laminated nature yields stones of even thickness making building easier.

Meanwhile, his cousin in the limestone dales will be ferreting about for his raw material and will accumulate piles of rocks shaped like footballs and pyramids with which to start his construction. The additional labour involved in sourcing and transporting the stone for building the original walls would double the cost.

In comparison, Bobby and I have it relatively easy these days. If we need more stone for a job, it entails a quick call to Blackie who arrives a day or two later with eight tons of walling stone pulled by a snorting 4WD tractor – the 21st century version of a Dales pony and cart.

We also have the benefit of thermal clothing, good waterproofs, dry feet, a warm ride home, and a hot bath at the end of the day. Having said that, dry stone walling is one of the few agricultural tasks which can never be mechanised and the actual building of the walls has remained unchanged for centuries.

Bobby gulps down a steaming mug of instant soup and offers his calculation on his earlier question. "I reckon it would take four or five men a lifetime to build all the walls we can see from here. That's a lot of soggy clothes, cold feet, bad backs, broken fingers and toes, and arthritic hips."

And the cost in monetary terms? At today's rates, it would probably take care of the majority of the yearly bonus of a centrally heated, air-conditioned city fat cat.